‘Death Has No Master’ review: Asia Argento finds herself adrift in heady, uneven Venezuelan drama

Dir/scr: Jorge Thielen Armand. Venezuela/Canada/Italy/Luxembourg. 2026. 104mins

To call Caro (Asia Argento) an heiress is a little misleading, making her sound more polished and privileged than she actually is. In fact, the central character in Jorge Thielen Armand’s feverish and uneven third feature is almost as emotionally battered and ravaged as the crumbling mansion in the jungles of Venezuela she has inherited from a father she hardly knew. Raised abroad, she returns to sell off her inheritance, but finds that she is a stranger in the country of her birth. And the house – her childhood home – has been claimed by her father’s former staff, who have no intention of vacating its cavernous, peeling rooms.

 The least assured of Armand’s films to date

With its simmering threats of violence, social divisions and savage tussles over land and resources, Death Has No Master could be viewed as an allegory for contemporary Venezuela. In this – and in the themes of frayed family connections, heady imagery and blurred distinctions between reality and fantasy – there’s a clear kinship between this film and Armand’s two previous pictures. His debut, hybrid docufiction La Soledad (2016), was a brooding, ghostly story set in a dilapidated villa in Caracas; his second, La Fortaleza (2020), starred Armand’s father, Jorge Thielen Hedderich (who also appears in this film) and explored a character’s battle with alcoholism and the renovation of a wrecked tourist lodge.

Yet, while the thematic territory is similar, Death Has No Master is the least assured of Armand’s films to date, with Argento’s jarring casting and uneasy performance something of a stumbling block. Still, there’s enough here that’s intriguing and unsettling to ensure further festival interest following the film’s world premiere in Directors’ Fortnight.

The question of ownership of land and buildings is a theme that clearly fascinates Armand. But it works the other way as well – the grand, decaying houses and derelict lodges of his films also stake a claim on the souls of those who inhabit them. In a way, these are ghost stories in which the building itself is doing the haunting. There’s certainly an oppressive sense of history in the house to which Caro returns. This is achieved through astute location work – the very fabric of the building in which most of the film is set feels as though it has soaked up generations of anguish and secrets.

There are also some rather more obvious devices: Caro spends an inordinate amount of time moping around looking at faded photographs of sad people; there are an awful lot of knives and whips strewn around the place. The use of sound is another tool that Armand employs creatively, with torn fragments of voices and mocking laughter from the past woven into the soundscape, like strips of peeling wallpaper exposing the past underneath.

The house becomes an arena for the conflict between Caro and Sonia (Dogreika Tovar), who worked for Caro’s late father and is the single mother of a young boy, Maiko (Yermain Sequera). In the absence of an owner, Sonia has claimed the building, renting out its rooms to strangers whose eyes follow Caro as she hovers, uncertain of how to proceed. Caro’s conflict extends beyond Sonia – her return to Venezuela has unleashed visions that may be dreams or suppressed memories of violence and fear. Nothing is overtly spelled out, but the film hints that Caro is a damaged individual who bears the scars of both the time she spent in this house and the wrench of leaving it.

When legal channels fail to solve the problem of the squatters in the house, Caro resorts to other means, asking for help from a shady former lawyer, Roque (Jorge Thielen Hedderich). He knows people, he says, who can give Sonia and her tenants a scare. But given the multiple hints of bloodshed to come seeded throughout the film, this plan can only end badly.